By Raymond Maingire
The Zimbabwe Times – Zimbabwe’s former ambassador to China, Christopher Mutsvangwa, has branded Zimbabwean journalists a bunch of ignoramuses who are quick to criticize their government at the instigation of western powers.
The remarks by Mutsvangwa, a fierce defender of President Robert Mugabe’s controversial rule, invited angry protests from Harare journalists who felt he was trying to distract them from writing about the excesses of the Zimbabwean leader.
Speaking during a panel discussion which focused on the media environment under the envisaged Zimbabwe Media Commission (ZMC) at the national press club, the Quill Club Friday, Mutsvangwa said local journalists had little knowledge about American politics but were quick to eulogize it while criticizing their own.
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By Carol Coulter
REPORTING ON asylum issues can have a major impact on the integration of refugees, on public opinion and on the development of policy, according to a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative.
Manuel Jordao was speaking on Friday 19, June 2009 at the launch of National Union of Journalists (NUJ) guidelines on reporting on refugees, co-sponsored by the Irish Refugee Council, the UNHCR and the union.
He said the global number of people uprooted by conflict and persecution stood at 42 million at the end of 2008.
“I can’t appeal to you to be positive in your reporting of these issues, but I can ask you to be accurate and balanced,” he said.
“Skewed, inaccurate or unbalanced reports on asylum can confuse public opinion, create false impressions and definitely makes the work of agencies like ours much harder.”
Press Ombudsman Prof John Horgan said that guides and codes, at the end of the day, are just that. “They can assist, but can never be a substitute for, the exercise by all journalists of a deep sense of personal responsibility, of their allegiance to truth and fair dealing and of their vocation to public service.”
He added that responsibility for responding adequately to the problems of refugees did not rest on the shoulders of journalists alone.
“The message has to come [also] from community and political leadership, and from individual and social institutions at every level.”
Séamus Dooley, of the NUJ, said that over the past ten years the coverage of asylum seekers and refugees had improved, but there was still work to be done.
“In times of recession there is a real danger that Irish society could again become more insular and that migrants could become scapegoats, through the peddling of familiar myths about welfare payments and extravagant entitlements.” He praised the response of local communities to the attacks on Romanians in Belfast earlier this week.
“Media coverage has reflected the strength of local feeling but has gone beyond that and the national newspaper titles in particular have provided remarkable leadership in words and pictures,” he said.
Freelance journalist and specialist on refugee issues Colin Murphy said that the use of language was important.
The term “asylum seeker” cast people as mendicants, and they were often portrayed as victims. It was important to choose language that showed people as individuals.
Abiba Ndeley, a journalist and a refugee, said that it was important to understand when interviewing refugees that sometimes they were careful about what they said, not because they were trying to hide things, but because they wanted to protect their families.
Robin Hanan, of the Refugee Council, said that accurate reporting informed public debate. It was important to understand not just the problems refugees had, but what they had to contribute to society. – Irish Times
Photo: Abdi Hassan/IRIN  |
| Jaffer Mohamed Kukay, a Somali journalist who is now a refugee in Djibouti (file photo) : Five Somali journalists have been killed and dozens more have left Mogadishu, this year, after receiving death threats |
(IRIN) – At least five Somali journalists have been killed and dozens more have left the capital, Mogadishu, this year, after receiving death threats – creating the spectre that some, if not all, independent media may close down due to lack of staff. There are 11 independent radio stations and two TV stations in the city.
“We are in a very difficult and dangerous situation. We are being forced to choose between reporting on what is happening and our lives,” Hamdi Kadiye, an executive member of the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUJOS), told IRIN.
The killing on 7 June of the Radio Shabelle director Mukhtar Mohamed Hirabe has added to pressure on journalists in the capital.
“All we do is cover the story. We don’t side with any group, but the fighting groups want to silence us to make sure no one hears or sees the suffering they are causing,” she added.
She said many journalists had left because “they no longer felt they could carry out their duties”.
She admitted that Somalia’s story may be lost in the process, but said: “You cannot ask someone to continue when you know their life is in serious danger.”
Since late 2006, when Ethiopian troops backing the Transitional Federal Government ousted the Union of Islamic Courts, dozens of Somali journalists have been killed, five of them this year alone, or forced into exile due to the ongoing fighting in the capital.
Ali Sheikh Yassin, deputy chairman of the Mogadishu-based Elman Human Rights Organisation (EHRO), told IRIN that journalists were in even “more danger now than at any time in the past”.
He said harassment and intimidation of journalists had increased this year. “We get reports of journalists getting anonymous calls and SMSs [text messages] threatening them.”
If this trend of journalists being killed or forced to flee continued, many independent media would be shut down, he added.
“Unfortunately, many of the radio stations and even the TV stations will close for lack of staff. There is a real danger that the independent media will be no more,” said Yassin.
That would be a catastrophe for the Somali people and particularly for the people of Mogadishu, he said, adding that the fighting groups could achieve their aim. “They are keen to keep the world from knowing the crimes being committed and the humanitarian disaster their actions and activities are creating.”
A civil society activist, who requested anonymity, told IRIN that both sides in the conflict were worried and afraid that the media reports would be used against them “if they are made to appear in court to answer to their actions”.
He added: “Thousands have been killed or maimed. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee their homes. Someone has to eventually take responsibility for that.”
If journalists left and the independent media ceased to exist, there would be no one to tell the story of those suffering in the camps, in their homes and in hospitals, he said. “They are not only killing and starving the people, now they will make sure no one knows about it.”
(CNN) — The Zimbabwean government has announced restrictive licensing fees for foreign journalists working in the country, demanding they pay an annual fee of $4,000 to practice journalism.
In addition foreign media groups must pay $10,000 for the application and $20,000 for accreditation, payable only in foreign currency, the government-controlled Media and Information Commission said Wednesday. An administration fee of $2,000 is necessary for the permit.
Zimbabwe has some of the harshest conditions for journalists in the world. Several foreign and local journalists have been arrested in Zimbabwe for lack of accreditation since a media law was passed in 2002.
Last month a spokesman for President Robert Mugabe threatened to ban foreign news bureaus in Zimbabwe, saying they quoted his boss out of context when reporting on the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe.
Most Western media organizations including CNN are banned from Zimbabwe. Those that do still operate there including Reuters, The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Al Jazeera would have to pay the fee if they wanted to report from the country.
Zimbabwean government spokesman George Charamba said the fee was being introduced because foreign media organizations were “reducing local reporters to mere runners.”
The new fees do not apply to journalists working for Zimbabwean organizations.
Foreign journalists who want to work temporarily in Zimbabwe must pay $500 and $1,000 for application and accreditation under the new rules.
Dzimbabwe Chimbga, a lawyer from the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, told journalists in Harare that the commission had no legal basis to charge the fees.
“I don’t see how you [journalists] should comply with a law that is non-existent. On the face of it, it is null and void. MIC is non-existent,” Chimbga said.
Another lawyer, Selby Hwacha, said journalists may be able to seek an order entitling them to work in Zimbabwe for the time being.
The Media Institute of Southern Africa [MISA] called on parliament to review the situation immediately.
It said the new fees for foreign media organizations and local journalists working for them “smack of machinations to frustrate and make it difficult to operate in Zimbabwe.”
The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) has announced an innovative three-year program, the African Development Journalism Fellowships, to improve news coverage of critical development issues such as agriculture, microfinance, sanitation and employment in sub-Saharan Africa. This journalism fellowship program is funded by a $2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The program addresses the need for increased information about rural regions, which are affected by policy decisions made in capital cities. Many news organizations in sub-Saharan Africa lack the resources and training to adequately cover rural issues that can determine whether their countries’ poorest citizens begin to prosper or remain trapped in poverty.
ICFJ will place media development professionals from its Knight International Journalism Fellowships program into key African countries to help influential media increase coverage of development issues, especially beyond the capitals. The program will create networks of professional and citizen journalists in rural areas, using mobile technology to connect them to media in large cities.
The program builds on the success of ICFJ’s Knight Health Journalism Fellowships, also funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Health Fellows work in Africa for a year to improve coverage of complicated health and research issues.
In this new initiative, media organizations will work with fellows to mentor reporters as they work on in-depth development stories in rural areas. The fellows will also develop a corps of African journalists with the skills to train colleagues to cover poverty and development issues. Additionally, fellows will help establish development reporting training programs at local journalism associations that will continue long after the program is over.
“Our Knight Health Fellows are mentoring African journalists to produce hard-hitting stories that are forcing governments to invest more in health care,” said ICFJ President Joyce Barnathan. “We believe these new fellows, using the latest mobile technology, will have similar impact in reducing poverty.”
The Knight Foundation has supported ICFJ’s flagship program, the Knight International Journalism Fellowships. This program makes tangible changes that improve the quality and free flow of news around the world in the public interest. The program sends international media professionals for at least a year to countries where there are opportunities to promote reliable, insightful journalism that holds officials accountable.
For more information about the African Development Journalism Fellowships, please visit icfj.org/development.
Source : Media in Zimbabwe
As guests mingled at the Waldorf-Astoria for the CPJ International Press Freedom Awards, the sound of gunfire echoed from a video screen–a stark reminder in an elegant environment of the dangers faced by the world press. Familiar names like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, and Jim Willse, editor of New Jersey’s Star-Ledger, came together with award winners from Afghanistan and Uganda, among other countries.
Gwen Ifill, CPJ board member and PBS moderator, began the award ceremony by telling the 800 guests that there was much to celebrate this evening. Jeff Zucker, chairman and CEO of NBC Universal, made clear that there is nothing more powerful than a free press, and that tonight, names would be put forward to celebrate the victories and mourn the losses of the world’s media.
Paul Steiger, CPJ’s board chairman, said we will not forget the world’s imprisoned journalists–an iteration that would become a theme for the evening. Bilal Hussein, an Associated Press Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, would address the crowd from an undisclosed location about his two years in detention by the U.S. military in Iraq, with no charges ever formally filed against him. Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez, founder of and contributor to Grupo de Trabajo Decoro, currently imprisoned in Cuba, was honored–CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, also a CPJ board member, read a letter he wrote from jail on his behalf.
Farida Nekzad, the deputy director of Pajwok Afghan News, an entirely Afghan-staffed news service based in Kabul, spoke of the struggle women have faced in her country since the fall of the Taliban. She ended her award acceptance with the chilling entreaty: “Please don’t forget us.”
In his introduction of Beatrice Mtetwa, the evening’s Burton Benjamin Award winner, the New York Times’ Barry Bearak talked about Mtetwa’s childhood habit of letting the air of her brothers’ bicycle tires, tires on the bikes that took them to school when she was forced to walk. She would later as a media rights lawyer in Zimbabwe stand up to the powerful, he said, and let the air out of their tires as called for. He would know. It was Mtetwa who helped secure his release from a Zimbabwean jail in April.
After the acceptance speeches and dinner, Bearak, who had never attended a CPJ awards ceremony, stood among his colleagues and said, “After this, any reporter would want to walk back out there and do their job.” – cjp.org
The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) on Tuesday condemned the Zimbabwean security details’ harassment of journalists covering Monday’s stalled talks to end the country’s political crisis, and called for the urgent repeal of Zimbabwe’s tough media laws that restrict media workers from freely exercising their right to work.
The Zimbabwe chapter of MISA reported that several journalists were barred from covering the meeting organised by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) security troika held in Harare on Monday.
The meeting was seeking to break the impasse over the allocation of ministerial positions between the ruling ZANU PF and the two factions of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
“Security details manning the entrance to the premises of the Rainbow Towers Hotel where the talks were being held turned away a number of freelance journalists who are not accredited with the statutory Media and Information Commission (MIC), demanding they produce MIC accreditation cards for them to cover the event,” MISA said.
It noted that accreditation of journalists by MIC was no longer compulsory following the December 2007 amendments to the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA).
The refusal of entry of the journalists comes two weeks after an official from the Ministry of Information and Publicity approached freelance journalists, Brian Hungwe and Peta Thornycroft, at the same venue and ordered them to leave the hotel as they were waiting for the outcome of the talks being facilitated by former South African president Thabo Mbeki.
“MISA-Zimbabwe calls upon the Parliament of Zimbabwe to repeal AIPPA as a matter of urgency as it poses serious violations to media freedom and freedom of expression and also vitiates against the 2002 Banjul Declaration on the Principles of Freedom of Expression in Africa which frowns upon statutory regulation of the media as is the case in Zimbabwe under the MIC,” the media rights body said.
The Banjul Declaration states that self-regulation is the best system of instilling professionalism in the media. – APA
Zimbabwe has slipped in press freedom rankings for the third successive year, according to a report by France-based Reporters without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières) released on Thursday, which also showed Namibia as the country with the best conditions for journalists in Africa.
Zimbabwe has been ranked 151st out of 167 countries surveyed by the Paris-based media rights body. The southern African country was ranked 149th in the Worldwide Press Freedom Index published by body in 2007.
In a commentary accompanying the 2008 index, Reporter Without Borders said practicising journalism in Zimbabwe was “a high risk exercise involving endless frustration and constant police and judicial harassment.”
At least a dozen journalists have been arrested in Zimbabwe this year for allegedly operating without government accreditation. Major international news agencies are banned from operating in the country under tough media laws introduced in 2002.
Namibia was for the second year judged the African country with a media-friendly environment, followed by Ghana, Malawi, Cape Verde, South Africa, Mauritius, Liberia, Togo, Burkina Faso and Botswana.
South Africa and Cape Verde were ranked 36th in the world, the same position as the United States which has repeatedly led international criticism of developing countries for alleged human rights abuses, including lack of press freedom. – Net News Publisher
The annual Reporters Without Borders index says Zimbabwe’s media lies in ruins and that life has become impossible for independent journalists. Tendai Maphosa reports for VOA from Harare.
The 2008 report of the Paris-based media lobby group says there were fewer press violations in 2007, because it says there are not many journalists left to arrest. It adds the few privately-owned publications that still appear, do so under tight surveillance.
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| Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, arrives for power-sharing talks with Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe in Harare, Zimbabwe, 17 Oct 2008 |
The report lists cases of Zimbabwean journalists arrested for doing their work during 2007. It mentions the disrupted prayer meeting when opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was arrested and brutally beaten up by the police.
Free-lance cameraman Edward Chikomba was found dead two weeks after the Tsvangirai beating. He was accused of being responsible for selling footage of a bruised and battered Tsvangirai to the international media.
The report says although amendments to the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act have liberalized the media environment in Zimbabwe, the state continues to harass those it describes as agents of the West.
Zimbabwe Union of Journalists president, Matthew Takaona, tells VOA the amendments to the Act, which became law in 2002 did not stop the harassment of journalists during the election campaigns earlier this year. He conceded things have eased somewhat since the June 27 presidential election runoff and the signing of the power-sharing agreement last month.
He says, for instance, journalists do not have to apply for a license to go about their work. Prior to the amendments, a journalist who operated without a license risked a two-year jail term. The license may not be a requirement anymore, but Takaona says there is a catch.
“You cannot access public places like government functions if you do not have an accreditation card, but anywhere else you can practice,” he said.
Another amendment abolishes the Media and Information Commission, which regulated the activities of the media since 2002. The government appointed commission was responsible for issuing licenses to journalists and media organizations. In its place will be a media commission, which is still to be set up by parliament.
Takaona says his union does not see this as an improvement.
“The media commission can be just another Media and Information Commission because it will be one of the arms of government that can be used to regulate the media we have said as the necessary for the media in any democratic society to be regulated by the state or by government but there must be self regulation. So it might still be the same Media and Information Commission but in a different jacket,” he said.
Since the passing of the Access to Information and Privacy Act, newspapers have been banned and there are no independent dailies in Zimbabwe. The government also has a monopoly on the electronic media. – VOA
The British Red Cross went off to the seaside with the Lib Dems this week, the first time in its history that they organised a fringe event at a political party conference.
At each of the three major party conferences, the Red Cross is organising a debate on the theme ‘forced to flee’. Panels made up of MPs, journalists and Red Cross experts will discuss why people flee their countries and seek sanctuary in the UK, as well as the difficulties they face when they arrive.
The debates will look at links between conflict and migration, perceptions of refugees and asylum seekers and suggest ways of responding to this global crisis. The audience will include politicians, party delegates, and representatives from the voluntary sector.
Exciting initiative
Daniel Rubio, public affairs officer, said: “This is a really exciting initiative for the British Red Cross – it’s the first time we’ve organised events like these at party conferences. Our fringe events are bringing together journalists, politicians and Red Cross spokespeople to debate the effects of conflict on civilians, highlighting the humanitarian situation of people who flee from war or persecution.
“This is our opportunity as a neutral intermediary to take these vital issues to the heart of the policy agenda. Our guest speakers in Bournemouth were well-received and provoked a lively debate from the audience.”
Leigh Daynes, head of media and public affairs, said: “We work with all parties to maintain our integrity as a politically neutral organisation. Influencing public policy is one way we can bring about change in the lives of vulnerable people in crisis.
“For example, we’ve successfully lobbied to include first aid in the schools curriculum and more first aid on the driving test, contributed to select committee enquiries, and regularly briefed elected representatives about our work.”
Liberal Democrats
The first debate was at the Liberal Democrats conference in Bournemouth on 16 September. Guest speakers included Edward Davey MP, Reuters journalist Peter Apps, and Red Cross head of refugee services Nick Scott-Flynn.
Labour
At the Labour party conference on 23 September in Manchester, Red Cross chief executive Nick Young will join journalists Martin Bright and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and Mike Gapes MP, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to discuss the issues.
Conservatives
Journalist Martin Bell will chair the final debate at the Conservative party conference on 30 September in Birmingham. He will be joined by Nick Young and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
Source : British Red Cross
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